Jan

1

A “You’re Welcome” is due to Jim and NJY for yesterday’s comments, plus an odd sprinkling over the years from others. But factually, the thanks should go to the readers and visitors.

This blog is here first to inform and amuse, primarily your humble writer, who gets to peruse the news each day for the topic of a post, get books and other promotional stuff, the curious offers for trips, plus hundreds of thousands of emails, and millions of spam comments.

For all the perks and problems there is the main point, progress and growth of energy and fuels. That’s what really attracts a grateful sensation.

Humanity has come a long way from two feet and campfire. Now the basics are recreation and exercise for many while so many others are still living the living standards of centuries ago.

Above all technology can offer more energy and fuel better and cheaper. It’s essential for health, progress and peace.

For research to get to market though, education has to happen. This blog does not pretend to educate, but to inform so that education can be used for personal and economic growth.

Everything living must grow, be it a plant, a baby, or a society. Growth can be just more babies, or it can be better-educated mothers and fathers. Almost always better education reduces population growth and improves living standards.

Education then must grow as well. That’s where research comes into the play of life. Research is primarily where more to learn comes from. It’s also what drives change, and change causes more adaptation that needs more education and then – more intellectual growth.

A few years back your humble writer had several tantalizing topics for each day’s posting. As the years wore on the press releases, articles and study papers have been reduced in number. The center, nexus, prime mover and core or research and innovation is here in the U.S. and for a few years the choices came from the huge Federal government grant pool that has shifted to development and choosing industrial promotion.

The news tells of hundreds of millions of dollars the government has lost making what are essentially – Bad Bets – into companies that are quite suspicious in the business model just to start. But the horror isn’t the bad bet or even the evaporation of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The horror is the public’s money could have been granted to more research, which would have added to the pool of knowledge, increased the educational knowledge base and offered the private economy routes to development.

It’s not just the ideas that work that matter. Few of them make huge industrial “disruptions” to revolutionize the economy and make wet dreams for venture capitalists. Rather its the attempt to seek new information, and very often it’s the new questions and surprising results that matter most. An effort to understand the not understood always leads to more things to understand. It’s the growth of science.

The growth of science is the most basic instrument of intellect.

People and politicians need to understand that development is risk and that basic and fundamental research is the soil of growth. Once the soil is in hand growth can begin. That new soil is the frontier of the future.

So when anyone says “That idea isn’t possible under the laws” or other rendition of things beings so fully understood as to be out of bounds for new or better understanding – shout them down – because those folks are the anchors that keep humanity under their no-growth thumb.

Your humble writer wishes all of you a healthy, growing and prosperous Happy New Year! Let the research grow!